I took the little clay pot from my purse. "Is this what you rejected?"

The ground began to tremble again. It seemed the whole Earth swayed. From the ranks of Hell came a monstrous ululation.

Klosterheim looked hard at it. "Aye. It's the same. And you've been deceived by the same trick, von Bek, as I told you."

"Then look upon it," I said. "Let all your forces look upon it. Look upon it!"

I hardly know why I spoke thus. I held the Grail up high. No shining came out of it. No music came out of it. No great event took place. It remained what it was: a small clay pot. Yet, here and there in the ranks of Hell, pairs of eyes became transfixed. They looked. And a certain sort of peace came upon the faces of those who looked.

"It is a Cure," I cried, following my instincts, "a Cure for your Pain. It is a Cure for your Despair. It is a Cure."

The poor damned wretches who had known nothing but fear throughout their existence, who had faced no future but one of terror or oblivion, began to crane to see the clay pot.Weapons were lowered. The gruntings and the gigglings ceased. Klosterheim was stunned. He made no protest as I moved towards his army.

"It is a Cure," I said again. "Look upon it. Look upon it."

They were falling to their knees. They were dismounting from their beasts. Even the most grotesque of them was transfixed by that clay pot. And still no special radiance came out of it. Still no miracle occurred, save the miracle of their salvation.

“In our wakeful awareness, most of us in the modern west quite automatically address the world with the questions ‘How does it work?’; ‘What caused it?’ But when we confront our dreams, such questions have no satisfying sense to them. Instead, we put a question of an entirely different order, one which our ancestors habitually asked of their experience as a whole, awake or dreaming. We ask, ‘What does it mean?’ For we at once recognize in our dreams a symbolic presence which makes what is before us other and more than it seems … [H]ere [in dreaming] is the dark mind thrusting forward a rival Reality Principle and, in the course of each night’s adventures, gaining our acquiescence. Psychiatry has learned to salvage this and that from the rich contents of the dreams. But until it integrates the dream as medium of experience into our lives, it has not reconciled the antagonism that divides the soul most radically, that between the contending realities of the waking and dark minds.”

Stranger Things is out? Nice. I'd been looking forward to that for a while. That one miniature they've been using in the trailers has always been my favourite design for Demogorgon. It's got a fugly kind of creepiness going for it that just it makes it work better for me than the hyena or mandrill heads, like a Showa era kaiju or an earlier illustration of a Lovecraftian horrors. There's something...personal about the sculpture.

It's always stuck with me. If this series solidifies that design in the public consciousness, then I'll be happy.

I found this beautiful animated gem as a randomly generated suggestion for my Youtube account. The Irish have always had a unique, thoughtful, and sometimes humorous relationship with death, so it comes as no surprise that this portrait of the psychopomp comes from artists from the Emerald Isle. Many of us never feel as if our time here is enough. What would you wish for more of in your last moments?

"Anytime that is ‘betwixt and between’ or transitional is the faeries’ favorite time. They inhabit transitional spaces: the bottom of the garden, existing in a space between manmade cultivation and wilderness. Look for them in the space between nurture and nature, they are to be found at all borders and boundaries, or on the edges of water where it is neither land nor lake, neither path nor pond. They come when we are half-asleep. They come at moments when we least expect them; when our rational mind balances with the fluid irrational.”
– Brian Froud

We’re excited to share this look at the map for Kij Johnson’s forthcoming Lovecraftian romp, The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe—available August 16th from Tor.com Publishing! Professor Vellitt Boe teaches at the prestigious Ulthar Women’s College. When one of her most gifted students elopes with a dreamer from the waking world, Vellitt must retrieve her. But the journey sends her across the Dreamlands and into her own mysterious past, where some secrets were never meant to surface…

Artist Serena Malyon was tapped to create the map of this strange world—one governed by a seemingly arbitrary dream logic, ruled by capricious gods and populated by the creatures of dreams and nightmares. Below, Malyon outlines the map-making process, including early sketches and alternate color roughs before revealing the final, breath-taking version.

You can also read an excerpt from The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe at the B&N SciFi and Fantasy Blog.

In The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and its Relation to the Rational, Rudolph Otto identifies and explores the non-rational mystery behind religion and the religious experience ("non-rational" should not be confused with "irrational"); he called this mystery, which is the basic element in all religions, the numinous. He uses the related word "numen" to refer to deity or God.

Forced, necessarily, to use familiar words, like "dread" and "majesty," Otto insists that he is using them in a special sense; to emphasize this fact, he sometimes uses Latin or Greek words for key concepts. This fact is crucial to understanding Otto. Our feeling of the numinous and responses to the numinous are not ordinary ones intensified; they are unique (I use this word in its original meaning of "one of a kind, the only one") or sui generis (meaning "in a class by itself"). For example, fear does not become dread in response to the numinous; rather, we cease to feel ordinary fear and move into an entirely different feeling, a dread that is aroused by intimations of the numinous or the actual experience of the numinous.

The word "absolute" is used in its metaphysical sense of "existing without relation to any other being; self-existent; self-sufficing" (OED); its adjectival form, "absolutely," is used with the same meaning. Finally, by "creature," Otto means a "being which has been created."

“Words bend our thinking to infinite paths of self-delusion, and the fact that we spend most of our mental lives in brain mansions built of words means that we lack the objectivity necessary to see the terrible distortion of reality which language brings. Example: the Chinese pictogram for ‘integrity’ is a two-part symbol of a man literally standing next to his word. So far, so good. But what does the Late English word ‘honesty’ mean? Or ‘Motherland’? Or ‘progress’? Or ‘democracy’? Or ‘beauty’? But even in our self-deception, we become gods.”
― Dan Simmons, Hyperion

Quote:

“Rage.

Sing, O Muse, of the rage of Achilles, of Peleus’ son, murderous, man-killer, fated to die, sing of the rage that cost the Achaeans so many good men and sent so many vital, hearty souls down to the dreary House of Death. And while you’re at it, Muse, sing of the rage of the gods themselves, so petulant and so powerful here on their new Olympos, and of the rage of the post-humans, dead and gone though they might be, and of the rage of those few true humans left, self-absorbed and useless though they have become. While you are singing, O Muse, sing also of the rage of those thoughtful, sentient, serious but not-so-close-to-human beings out there dreaming under the ice of Europa, dying in the sulfur ash of Io, and being born in the cold folds of Ganymede.

Oh, and sing of me, O Muse, poor born-against-his-will Hockenberry, dead Thomas Hockenberry, Ph.D., Hockenbush to his friends, to friends long since turned to dust on a world long since left behind. Sing of my rage, yes, of my rage, O Muse, small and insignificant though that rage might be when measured against the anger of the immortal gods, or when compared to the wrath of the god-killer Achilles.

On second though, O Muse, sing nothing of me. I know you. I have been bound and servant to you, O Muse, you incomparable bitch. And I do not trust you, O Muse. Not one little bit.”
― Dan Simmons, Ilium

Quote:

“the essence of human experience lay not primarily in the peak experiences, the wedding days and triumphs which stood out in the memory like dates circled in red on old calendars, but, rather, in the unselfconscious flow of little things – the weekend afternoon with each member of the family engaged in his or her own pursuit, their crossings and connections casual, dialogues imminently forgettable, but the sum of such hours creating a synergy which was important and eternal.”
― Dan Simmons, Hyperion

Quote:

“Entropy is a bitch,”
― Dan Simmons, Endymion

Quote:

“[A lesser light asked Ummon Are there multiple futures> Ummon answered Does a dog have fleas>]”
― Dan Simmons, The Fall of Hyperion

What an irony that, when you have a vivid, funny, terrifying, elaborate dream, you dare not tell anyone for fear of boring them. But what if you could let someone else experience your dreams first-hand? The group of independent filmmakers behind this year’s collective:unconscious (not to be confused with the New York artist group of almost the same name) have put their waking heads together to come as close as possible to doing just that. Daniel Patrick Carbone, Josephine Decker, Lauren Wolkstein, Frances Bodomo, and Lily Baldwin have created a portmanteau film by adapting one another’s dreams for the screen, which you can dream along with them by watching free on Vimeo.

“I remember back when I was a teen, watching Mulholland Drive for the first time in the theater,” writes collective:unconscious‘ producer Dan Schoenbrun in an essay on the making of the film at Indiewire. “I remember my mind being blown. I remember thinking, ‘Movies can do that?'” David Lynch has made his name with pictures, Mulholland Drive and others, that feel dreamlike in the richest, most haunting sense of the word. But rather than a set of Lynch homages, each of the five filmmakers contributing here come at the project of cinematizing the unconscious experience differently. Some may feel just like your own dreams; others may feel nothing like them....

Following my discussion of surrealism, I wanted to continue to dig into "big" concepts that are key elements of the Invisible Sun setting. Today I want to explore a notion that has gone without a direct name in several recent interviews with Monte Cook: the concept of microcosm.

--
Mother
I reach for the dark
[...]
I go and I know, and I wait for you
Hold on and go on, 'cos I'll wait for you
Faster, faster, the leaves will fall
The sky will grey and my skin will dull
Hold on and go on, 'cos I'll wait for you
-- Grimes, Crystal Ball (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ze1ux7GiW_s)

Gamarna - Herr Mannelig
The scenes are from the movie Beowulf & Grendel with Gerard Butler (The most authentic Beowulf and Grendel movie I've seen so far, in regards of 6th century armor and clothing).

Many medieval legends and myths of western europe supposed, that faeries, sprites, trolls etc. had no souls, as they were not human. But if a faery gained the love of a (pious) human and married her/him it would be given an immortal soul.

This theme is also repeated in Hans Christian Andersen’s „The little Mermaid“ (not the Disney version) and mentioned by the king in the Mummelsee in „Simplicius Simplicissimus”.

Thus the plight of the troll would be to live on without a soul and without hope of salvation in afterlife.

At the door to the House of Darkness
lies a pair of red coyotes with heads reversed.
Nayenezgani parts them with his dark stag
and comes in search of me.
With lightning behind him,
with lightning before him,
he comes in search of me,
with a rock crystal and a talking ketahn.

Beyond, at the corners by the door
of the House of Darkness,
lie two red btuejays with heads reversed.
With lightning behind him,
with lightning before him,
he parts them with his dark staff
and comes in search of me.

Farther, at the fire-pit of the Dark House,
tie two red hoot-owls with heads reversed.
He parts these with his stag
and comes in search of me,
with rock crystal and talking ketahn.

At the center of the Darkness House
where two red screech-owls lie with heads reversed,
Nayenezgani casts them aside
coming in search of me,
lightning behind him,
lightning before him.
Bearing a rock crystal and a talking ketahn,
he comes for me.
From the center of the earth he comes.

Farther...

Quote:

Things that flee and things that pursue
have their seasons.
Each of us hunts
and each of us is hunted.
We are all of us prey;
we are all predators.
Knowing this, the careful hunter
is wary. The prey, too, learns boldness
beyond its normal reach.
And then there is luck,
and then the gods.
The hunt is always uncertain.

We skinned the wolf
and in the morning
a human hide hung there.
At night, it became again
the pelt of a wolf.

There is no certainty,
there is no law
in the hunt.

Talking-god be with me.
Black-god be with me.
Luck and boldness
be with me, too.